Body- acceptable?

Sometimes, a phrase or question I read worms its way into the nether recesses of my mind, only to resurface unexpectedly when my subconscious decides it´s time to deal with it.
The question that has surfaced today is one that is probably part of the core of my weight problem. Namely, what do I think about my body?

For me, the spontaneous reaction to that question, for most of my life, would have been, "it´s a darn nuisance".

For most of my life, I have watched other people who had bodies that did what they told them. Bodies that jumped when they wanted to jump, that ran when they wanted to run.
And then I have been looking at my overweight, poorly-coordinated body, and I hated to be stuck in there.
I hated the fact that I was constantly tripping over my own feet, that I have little sense of equilibrium, that with every new physical activity, I have to first intellectually grasp the required movements, and then it takes ages for my limbs to perform these movements properly.
I hated being the subject of ridicule in P.E. class, hanging from the bars like a sack of wet sand, or being unable to even  balance on the balance beam unaided.
I hated having to do running sprints, only to trip over my own feet within the first couple of meters, ending up flat on my face while my classmates were already at the end of the track.
And I felt doomed to stay that way.
Add to that some "well-meaning" relatives that ridiculed my every attempt at moving, it was enough to convince me that moving wasn´t for me.
Consequently, I have, for a long time, considered my mind the important part of me, and my body a nuisance best ignored.
I did not want to know if it needed something, I did not want to know if there was anything I could do to make it work better.
And I have, for a long time, not even considered the possibility that my childhood experiences that did so thoroughly put me off exercise might have something to do with how exercise was presented to me.

Today, I know that I was, during the time of my life when other kids are out in the playground learning how to master the art of moving, kept mostly inside by my well-intentioned grandparents, the effect being that I knew how to read by age four, but, when I entered school and had my first P.E. class, I had never even seen a ball and didn´t know what to do with it. I had never climbed anything higher than a chair, and I had never run a distance longer than our living room.
So, I probably missed a lot of neural pathways from brain to muscle that in other kids are grown by playing.
And I do know by now that there is really something measurably off with my sense of equilibrium, which means that I notice it later when I get out of balance and have less time to react. Which explained my frequent falls.
I´m not blaming my grandparents, they had no idea of what they were unintentionally depriving me of, but I know today that at the very least my P.E. teachers, instead of allowing me to become the laughing stock of everybody, should have noticed that I was lacking even the most basic athletic abilities, and tried to give me exercises to allow me to learn them. Instead, I was very much left on my own.
Once a year, we used to have a big fitness test that required, for girls, a sprint, long jump, and throwing a small, baseball-like ball. All three of which I didn´t know how to do properly. So, every year I was shamed to be the only one who had zero points on that test.
On the last time I had to undergo that test, I got rebellious. For boys, the events besides long jumping were medium-distance running and shot put. As I had been doing medium-distance runs with a friend for a while then, I insisted on doing the boys´events. Probably because my results couldn´t get any worse anyway, the teacher allowed it.
And that was the only time I ever had any points on that test.

After leaving school for the university, I stopped doing sports completely. Instead, I started battling my body for every ounce of weight it had been gaining, and I started comparing it to the bodies of models I saw in women´s magazines.
Someone said that you can´t make a basset into a greyhound by starving it, you´ll just end up having a very hungry basset. Harsh but true.
The only thing that my attempts at becoming a greyhound, so to speak, got me was a full-blown case of binge eating disorder.
And even more body hatred.

To this day, I have difficulty telling whether I am hungry, or thirsty, or cold.  I look at the thermometer every morning to see what kind of jacket I have to put on, because I know I´d barely notice it if I were freezing. I have to count the cups of water I drink because I would, as likely, eat some dry cookies as I would drink a glass of water when dehydrated.

The end result of many years of not taking proper care of this body is what I am now contending with.


Julia